We need to show our power and force Governor Crist to veto the bill!
We need to meet and organize ourselves autonomously as teachers from the bottom up!

Why we should oppose Florida Senate Bill 6/ HB 7189:

It’s a Tallahassee takeover of education at the expense of local collective bargaining

It will destroy education by forcing it to focus on test taking tips, strategies and memorization techniques; rather than critical thinking, learning and understanding which can’t be measured in standardized tests

It will increase inequalities by incentivizing teachers to abandon students with less parental support, financial tutoring means and family educational background in favor of schools with students with these background supports

It’s an unfunded mandate that will take more money from public schools and put it in the hands of standardized testing companies

It will take more time away from our students education in requiring class time for the administration of these new standardized tests in every subject

It eliminates salary funding from areas with proven indicators of quality teaching: years of experience and higher education degrees

It eliminates incentives for involvement in the National Board Certification program

It makes teachers financial planning unstable by cutting their salaries in half and then basing the other half of their pay on varying student test scores on one high stakes standardized test at the end of the year

It opens the door for greater nepotism and unstable and biased working environments by granting administrators excessive and arbitrary firing power

Please forward this information as widely as possible to all teachers, parents, community members and everyone you know to spread the word and support the struggle of the teachers against this attack on teachers and public education!
Note: This is a spontaneous call by teachers to take matters into their own hands. Miami Autonomy and Solidarity is posting the teachers’ call in a show of support for their struggle!

Education reform seems to be the buzzword coming out of all the politicians’ mouths these days, and these words have taken on a menacing form in the case of Florida. In Florida, education reform is supposedly at the bottom of legislation such as HB7189 and SB 6. These companion bills, emerging from the Florida House of Representative and the Senate respectively, claim to have education reform in mind, but are little more than thinly veiled attacks on the teaching profession, and in particularly its unions. While I think there is much to be desired from our public education system, make no mistake about it these bills simply don’t address any of the fundamental problems plaguing our current system. Continue reading →

“This disease of disorganization has invaded the organism of the anarchist movement like yellow fever and has plagued it for decades…There can be no doubt, however, that this disorganization has its roots in a number of defects of theory, notably in the distorted interpretation of the principle of individuality in anarchism, that principle being too often mistaken for the absence of all accountability.” –Delo Truda Group[1]

“…[O]rganization, far from creating authority, is the only cure for it and the only means whereby each one of us will get used to taking an active and conscious part in the collective work, and cease being passive instruments in the hands of leaders.” –Errico Malatesta[2]

The assessment of the Delo Truda Group from 1926 is as true today as it was 84 years ago. But if that’s the case; and if, as Malatesta suggested, organization is the only cure for authority, how do we as anarchists differ from others in how we view organization? Or more specifically, how does our view of individuality differ from the common misconception of anarchism as the “absence of all accountability”. Perhaps it’s best summed up by Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt in their exhaustive account of the history of anarchist ideas, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. They explain:

“…[G]enuine individual freedom and individuality could only exist in a free society. The anarchists did not therefore identify freedom with the right of everybody to do exactly what one pleased but with a social order in which collective effort and responsibilities- that is to say, obligations- would provide the material basis and social nexus in which individual freedom could exist.”[3]

This essay will describe anarchist accountability and how it differs from the types of accountability we’re trying to replace. Implementing accountability in all of our practices is fundamental to our effectiveness now in our practice and how it prefigures the kind of society that we want to replace the existing society.

We wanted to update everyone on the money that has been raised for Batay Ouvriye , as well as what Batay Ouvriye has said they will use it for. In the next week we will have a report of BO’s activities with more detail.

So far $6,724 has been donated and we have been able to distribute $2,320 to Batay Ouvriye.

A natural disaster has descended upon Haiti whose scope we only are seeing the surface of at this time. The Haitian people will be struggling to rebuild their lives and their home possibly for decades in light of unprecedented collapse, both physical and social. Yet despite the unpredictability of earthquakes, this disaster is unnatural, a monstrosity of our time. Continue reading →